Re: LYNX-DEV Lynx' indentation display

[Foteos Macrides]

"Christopher R. Maden" <address@hidden> wrote:
>[David Smith]
>> Hi, we've had some display problems here using lynx.
>> 
>> Our company has an internal web, and all the manual pages for our
>> in-house software (tons of it) is on the web, and makes extensive
>> use of the <MENU> html tag. We use Netscape to access the manual
>> pages, and lynx scripts for quick command-line display from Unix
>> shells.
>> 
>> The trouble is, Netscape displays the <MENU> indentations one way,
>> but lynx displays the indentations another.
>
>Both browsers are in error-recovery mode; <menu> can not nest.  If you
>need nested lists, you should use <ul>, <ol>, or <dl>.  The <menu> and
><dir> elements are for simple lists.  From RFC 1866:
>
>   The <MENU> element is a list of items with typically one line per
>   item.  The menu list style is typically more compact than the style of
>   an unordered list.
>
>   The content of a <MENU> element is a sequence of <LI> elements.
>   Nested block elements are not allowed in the content of <MENU>
>   elements.

        To elaborate on that, in conjunction with the doublespeak
that the W3C started developing in May, 1996, e.g.,

        "fringe browser"  == "not Netscape or MSIE, and thus doesn't
                              exit"
        "not implemented" == "neither Netscape nor MSIE have implemented
                              that; only some fringe browsers, which
                              don't exit"

Dave Raggett answered the plethora of complaints about having left the
PLAIN attribute (which neither Netscape nor MSIE support) out of the
so-called HTML 3.2 specs with "It's not needed because it's encompassed
by MENU."  I know, Chris, as did everyone else on the address@hidden
list, that it's not, but for better or worse I thus made <MENU> a
synomym for <UL PLAIN> in our fringe browser.

        The consequence is that you have different 1st versus subsequent
line indents (what you saw in that PRE glitch, for which the implied
<P> had a 1st rather than subsequent line indentation), and a single-
space paragraphing style (the indentations, rather than double-spacing,
distinguish successive LIs).

                                Fote

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 Foteos Macrides            Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research
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